Month: May 2007

General

Dermot Quill’s World Tour continues in Bolivia

May 1, 2007 by 0 Comments

A friend of mine is currently travelling the world. Here is his third report … His previous two reports include adventures in Nepal and Argentina/Chile.

I am now in Bolivia having left Argentina forever. Firstly, we went to Tupiza which is where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid met their end (allegedly). I spent a day there doing what is known as the Triathlon, which consisted of a 15k mountain bike ride followed by three hours on a horse through the most amazing high western scenery (and yes, I can reasonably control a horse at this stage) followed by another 2-hour jeep climb to 4200 metres and finally another 40 minute gravity-assisted bike descent on hairpin bends.

Next it was an 8 hour drive to the Salt Plains of Uyuni. It is impossible to describe how incredible they are so I won’t bother. Look at pictures on the internet. We stayed the night in a hostel built entirely of salt bricks, including the bed. The “carpet” was unrefined salt. I had dinner there too but ironically it needed more salt!!!

I am now in a place called Potosi. This was once the richest city in the world thanks to the silver mines. Over 8 million Indians died here over the course of 200 years. I’m going down the mines myself this afternoon.

Anyway off to buy a few sticks of dynamite for the mine visit (and I am not joking by the way!).

All the best, Dermot

General

Lotto Torture

May 1, 2007 by 2 Comments

Personally, I don’t play the Irish Lottery draw (known simply as lotto) that often but had cause to do so recently on behalf of a group of friends. To make life easy, I decided to let the machine choose the numbers (Quick Pick) and re-use those same numbers for 8 consecutive draws.

I then visited the Lotto Website every couple of days and used their new feature (fantastically named Check My Lotto Numbers) to see if we had won anything. All you do is enter your 6 numbers, choose how many draws you want to check again and press a button. It will then tell you if (and when) you’ve won anything.

However, the down-side to this simple feature is that you are naturally tempted to torture yourself by checking the same numbers against every draw that ever was, just in case you ever might have been a millionaire. The temptation is enormous and I killed several cats in the process.

Oh, and by the way, we didn’t actually win anything!